


The Ironmonger's Bed

by sinuous_curve



Category: Captain America (2011)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-01-02
Updated: 2012-01-02
Packaged: 2017-10-28 18:15:39
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,131
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/310736
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sinuous_curve/pseuds/sinuous_curve
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>When the war ends, Peggy sees Howard Stark once from across a room. They are both, in very secret ways, heroes and that is a much colder comfort than she imagined it would be. </i></p>
            </blockquote>





	The Ironmonger's Bed

**Author's Note:**

> Written largely at the behest of dancinbutterly, and I hope she enjoys it. Graciously beta'd by renne.

_we expected something, something better than before.  
we expected something more. _

 

When the war ends, Peggy sees Howard Stark once from across a room. They are both, in very secret ways, heroes and that is a much colder comfort than she imagined it would be.

Howard tips his fingers at her in a small wave. He’s going north, very far north, and they both know what he intends to do. Whether or not he finds the wreckage of the plane is quite an unnecessary detail. It won’t change anything and Peggy, perhaps, would rather remember the good Captain as a very small man sitting in the back of an automobile, cataloguing his heroic childhood exploits.

A better woman would make her way through the press of people, caught between solemnity and jubilation. She would at least shake his hand and make some wry comment about fondue that no one else would understand. But she doesn’t; she nods at him over the shoulders of men and women just as bone-weary as she, because she has just placed Steve Rogers’ file in a box. Because that is what he has been reduced to.

London is ragged in so many places, where rows of buildings gape like mouths with missing teeth and every moment echoes with the expected sound of sirens. Peggy finds her old flat reduced to a pile of cold ash and rubble. She never did manage to spend much time there, not before the war and certainly not once it started. But it was as good a home as she had and she kneels on the pavement in her civilian clothes and touches her palm to the scorched brick of the garden wall.

Later, she looks up in the records whether her neighbors survived. The mum and two children next door did, and apparently the young couple on the first floor took off for the country and she can’t find anything further. The old man who lived in the front, Mr. Chesapeake, never made it out the back way.

Peggy cries looking at that and feels foolish and hopeless and unhappy and angry.

She knows that she is needed now perhaps more than ever, with soldiers returning home in droves and so many of them wounded. With London still bleeding and the whole rest of Europe smoking like a blackened field. Her loss is so small, so very small. Mothers and fathers have lost all their sons, and wives have lost their husbands and fathers and their children. And that’s just the fighters, not the whole awful sprawl of those who found the war falling onto their doorsteps from the sky.

Steve Rogers was one man, and she got to say goodbye. And yet.

To her superior she says, “I’m so sorry, sir,” and lifts her chin.

He looks at her with deep lines carved from the corners of his eyes and bracketing his mouth and slashing across his forehead. At the beginning of the war, he was a handsome man settled well and comfortably in middle age, but now he is gray and old and stooped. “Your assignment,” he says, mindful of the bright red CLASSIFIED stamps that still constrain her life, “was more difficult than many. I do understand.”

Her release from duty is expedited by her sex, which is an injustice she can only muster a quiet, resigned unhappiness toward. She fought so passionately to earn her place; she fought harder to earn her assignment in the states and for what?

It would be easier, she thinks, if she could close her eyes and see only the moments that left her warm. Steve knocking down the flag pole and climbing into the truck, and how hard it was not to laugh at all the outraged brutes as they glared balefully at the unit shrimp. Steve emerging from Dr. Erskine’s machine (it looked like to coffin to her, then, and it does even more in memory). God, she nearly _touched_ him. She wanted to. She wanted to very badly.

Steve Rogers, Captain bloody America, standing in a bar in dress uniform with a drink in his hand. Slicked and shined, polished to an unrealistic loveliness. Howard standing at his side, Bucky at the table. Her boys, she thought of them privately. Her brave soldier boys who were going to save the world.

They did. At a cost.

In her small rented room, arranged through the good auspices of the army, she strips off her uniform with careful, measured precision. She folds the pieces very neatly and nestles them very carefully in box. A very small part of her, bitter and frightened and lost, thinks pettily that she ought to toss them in the fire and let them burn. But God, she isn’t angry about that. She’s not angry the war was fought, she’s not angry she took part, she's not angry about any of that.

She is very hurt that she lost someone. And that, Peggy thinks, is not a feeling she has any right to claim only for herself.

There is no one she needs to say goodbye to but London herself. Her poor girl. She knew the Blitz was happening and they were even there for some of it, but she never looked. Perhaps it was easier not to see. Because a few broken buildings didn’t seem like anything when she knew was Schmidt was trying to do. Because she has never been a very good daughter.

Peggy makes her way back to her flat, or what was once her flat. She lays a grubby American nickel on the garden wall, for Mr. Chesapeake. She has the impression he enjoyed coins, though she couldn’t swear to it. “It’s not very good,” she murmurs. “I’m sorry. It’s the best I could manage.”

Travel is still more an act of necessity than desire, but she’s technically only taken recuperative leave and not been entirely discharged, so she finds a space on one of the liners pressed uncomfortably into military service. She takes the train to Southampton, sitting on a hard wooden bench with her suitcases pressed against her knees. A little boy with hair like straw stares at her from across the aisle the whole way, eye wide and blue.

Peggy smiles at him, once, and he summarily retreats to the comfort of his mother’s side. She wonders what he has lost and where they are going.

It’s eight days across the ocean to New York and almost without realizing it, she spends them with her stomach clenched so tightly into knots she feels perpetually as though the slightest motion will send her to be sick over the railing. When she closes her eyes, she hears the sharp report of gunfire and the sound of bombs and she smells burning and smoke and acrid fear and God, maybe it would be easier for a rogue mine to bring about a nice, clean end.

And that is a thought she does her best not to foster. She is alive, she is alive, she is alive, and that is a gift. It should be. It _is_. She has a date, after all, one that she has no intention of missing.

On the fourth day, standing at the railing with the wind tossing her hair wildly about, a young man in an American uniform comes up beside her. He keeps a distance that she supposes looks to be respectful on his part, but she senses that it’s rather as close as he can stand to be. Peggy sympathizes easily with that; she dislikes being touched as well.

“Is New York your last stop?” he asks in broad, loose English. His dark hair is cut down nearly to his scalp and his face is very thin.

“I haven’t decided yet,” Peggy replies. “Is it yours?”

He shakes his head. “No, I’m from Georgia. It’s--” he gestures illustratively with one hand, “--down south.”

“You’re going home,” Peggy says.

“Yeah.” His smile is real, but ragged around the edges. Touched with fear and desperation. “Guess I am. You’re leaving it?”

Peggy shrugs and turns her eyes back to the water. It’s endless, lovely blue. “In a way,” she agrees.

When the ship docks in New York, she steps onto solid ground and her knees tremble at the effort to keep from shifting back and forth, and she is so strongly inundated with Steve Rogers that she feels as though she might gag. She stands with one suitcase clutched in each hand so tightly her knuckles turn bloodless yellow and gasps for breath, and calm, and comfort. The war is _over_ and she still does not feel _safe_.

The docks of New York, much like the docks of Southampton, are busy and crowded with people. More of them in uniform now than before, grimmer than before, though there are rare smiles breaking through like the first glimpse of sun after a storm. Children dart back and forth, some in grubby packs with dirty face and others with worried, thin-lipped parents a step behind, calling out their names.

Peggy realizes that she had hoped very quietly and very deeply that Steve would be waiting for her when she got off.

“Silly girl,” she says to herself, blinking hard. “Silly, daft, ridiculous girl.”

She supposes, as she sets off, there ought to be a comfort in knowing that she is not alone in her life being a shambles.

New York is not necessarily a friendly city, but there is comfort in sinking back into the persistent, eternal movement and noise of the metropolis. It’s odd to walk along the pavement -- sidewalk, she reminds herself, here it’s the sidewalk -- and see complete rows of buildings, no bombed out husks staggering in jagged peaks toward the sky. There is a great sense of relief from the people, disbelieving relief. The war is over.

Peggy has sufficient funds to take a room in one of the better hotels, with names like The Plaza and The Ritz that always sound to her as though they aspire to be castles rather than temporary respites. She stands outside them in turn, watching doormen in neat uniforms greet the patrons with polite smiles and she feels so utterly apart from this world. Bruised, yes, because the whole of creation has been bruised by the last ten years, but it is a more distant hurt.

She misses the front, which is perhaps the most awful thing she has ever realized about herself. She misses sleeping on hard cots beneath thin tents, wrapped in all her clothing to keep from freezing to death. She misses the drunken singing of soldiers in three different languages, hurling back insults and pledges of eternal friendship with equal, endearing fervency. She misses her boys, their solid shapes and the smell of leather and gunpowder and earth that clung to their skin.

Somewhere between leaving for America and their very secret project and V-E Day she lost the ability to not be a soldier. Her civilian clothes fit oddly against her skin and she is in a city where there is even less for her than back home.

She hails a taxi and instructs the driver to take her to Brooklyn, to the street where Dr. Erskine built his machine that was going to change the course of the war. He succeeded, of course, in a bit of a sideways manner. Peggy has sometimes wondered what would have changed had the Hydra agent not made his way in and killed the good doctor, leaving behind Steve Rogers in a new body with his old heart thumping in his chest. She can’t at all imagine anyone else as Captain America, nor can she picture units filled with Captain Americas.

It is perhaps a touch of cynicism on her part, but she doubts there are that many simply good people in the world.

The driver stops in front of a modest hotel, with a neat hand-lettered sign in the front window that says _Rooms Available_ in very careful handwriting. He graciously retrieves her suitcases from the back, puffing at the exertion and mopping his face with a handkerchief. Most of her money is in pounds, though she has a few American dollars she never got around to exchanging back when the SSR sallied forth to European shores.

“Forgive me, I hope this is enough.” Peggy presses the crumpled bills into his hand and the driver pockets them without counting.

“It’s fine, sweetie, you’ve got a cute accent.”

The man is old enough to be her father and the words are amiable rather than lecherous. Peggy manages a small smile. “Thank you.”

The driver slams the trunk closed and takes one last swipe of his handkerchief at his face. “You’re a long way from home, miss. I hope you have a good stay.”

Peggy watches him climb back into his taxi, start up the engine with a sputtering roar, and take off down the street. A trio of young boys sitting on a stoop whoop as he passes, and a mother shushes through the open front window. Peggy lives with a constant quiet astonishment at the ability people have to simply carry on. Life does not stop, except for hers. She feels like a relic.

The proprietor is a woman of indistinct age, stooped enough to no longer be in the prime of her life but spry enough to not yet be considered elderly. There are thick streaks of silvery gray in her brown hair, wound into a neat bun at the nape of her neck, and her house dress is old and faded, but scrupulously clean and well cared for. There is a picture of a young man in military dress on the wall beside the rows of pigeonholes with room numbers on small brass plates affixed to each one.

The frame isn’t draped in black, though, and Peggy wishes fervently and deeply that he is somewhere slowly making his way home.

Peggy signs her name in a big, leather bound book (writing Peggy instead of Margaret, as she usually does. There is a curious kind of freedom that comes from knowing her every move is no longer part of any official record) and the proprietor hands her a key with a spidery #112 engraved on the handle.

“Up the stairs and to the left,” she says, in a voice that reminds Peggy of dusty attics and old books left too long on the shelf, so the pages are crackle with dryness and sad abandonment. “Please, let me know if you need anything.”

“Thank you,” Peggy says, settling the key in her pocket and hefting her suitcases up. She glances at the photograph again and asks, “Is that your son?”

The proprietor looks over her shoulder and twines her fingers together, rubbing restlessly and absently at the swollen joints and papery skin of her hands. “Yes, that’s my Robert.” She smiles in a way that Peggy has seen too many times.

“Is he--” Peggy stops, shakes her head. “Forgive me, it’s none of my business.”

“I don’t know,” the proprietor says. “I haven’t had a letter from him in a long time. But I haven’t gotten a letter from the army either. I just don’t know.”

If there is anything worse than absence, it is not knowing. Peggy swallows down something thick and heavy in her throat. “I hope he comes home to you soon.”

The proprietor nods. “Me too, miss.”

Room #112 is small and neat, with a bed made to exacting crispness in the center, a small set of drawers, and a chair in the far corner beside a lamp and a low table. Everything is a touch faded, threadbare in places and Peggy suspects that there hasn’t been money or means or plenty to replace anything in rather a long time. She hardly minds; she’s only just become re-accustomed to sleeping on a proper bed at all.

She takes a solid hour unpacking her suitcases, ignoring the small seed of panic beginning to blossom in the back of her mind. She has spent the last month in motion, always with something to do. First closing down all the hidden places so they would never be found by the unwary, then the sheer brutal amounts of paperwork that come from tidying up after a war, then arranging for travel, then traveling. Now that she’s come to rest, Peggy realizes she doesn’t know what she’s going to do. That is a very particular kind of anchorless terror.

Her civilian clothes take up depressingly little room in the small wardrobe. She only has a few pairs of trousers and blouses, and two dresses that she bought in a reactionary moment in effort to convince herself that she is longer a soldier. She needn’t dress practically for the mud and cold and rain of an army camp, for slogging through eastern Europe with disaster forever breathing down her neck. She hasn’t worn either of them yet. They make her feel uncomfortably vulnerable.

Her undergarments fill one dresser drawer and her nightclothes another. She sets her other pair of shoes (a pair of sturdy, practical and yet still a touch feminine heels that she also hasn’t worn) at the end of her bed and then stands in the middle of the room with her hands clasped together and the only sound blood in her ears and the harshness of her breath.

It is the height of irrationality to presume that she could possibly be the only one in the world who feels this way, as though there is a sucking wound in her chest pumping life and meaning out in a wet, hot spill on the floor. As though somehow she lost the ability to think outside the context of the War, always and eternally capitalized within her own mind.

She was a child when the Great War -- the first World War -- ended and she remembers only a great sense of childish relief that everything could get promptly back to normal, and later a peripheral awareness of hunched men on the streets with missing limbs and haunted eyes. For years she had lived and breathed Hitler and the Nazi's and the SSA and learned to live with a fear so great she never realized how the weight of it slowly broke her bones as she carried it.

Peggy does not want to be a flesh and blood ghost, but God, she can understand how one becomes just that.

The sun has begun to set and a wiser woman, Peggy thinks, would see about dinner and then settle into bed. She has a few novels stacked on the bedside table; she carried them with her over thousands of miles, oceans and mountains and mud and rain and never got much past the first chapter in any. The blank pages have long since been neatly excised for letter paper, when the bureaucracy couldn’t keep pace with the vanguard of the army.

She is not a wiser woman.

Peggy neatens her hair in the small, square mirror that hangs beside the window. She notes the bruise-colored shadows beneath her eyes and the fine lines bracketing her mouth and eyes. “Poor thing,” she sighs, touching the tip of her finger to her skin. She tries to smooth away the last decade and, of course, can’t.

For a moment, staring into the wardrobe, she considers changing from her trousers, blouse, and boots to one of the dresses. But the thought of the gesture seems too utterly funereal and she’s not certain of her ability to withstand another goodbye. There are still many nights when she dreams about Steve’s voice over the radio, sad and certain and so terribly courageous. She slips on leather coat and does it up to her chin, tucking the rest of her American money into her pocket and buttoning the flap.

The proprietor of the hotel is sitting behind the high desk, embroidering handkerchief stretched tight in a wooden hoop. She smiles faintly at Peggy and nods, says, “I go to bed early, dear, but I’ll leave the door unlocked. Just do it up when I get back.”

“Yes, of course,” Peggy agrees, tipping her hand in a wave. “Have a good evening.”

Politeness comes still so easily, though Peggy supposes that politeness is itself the strongest means of hiding. She can remember dying soldiers in the medical tent apologizing for their rotting flesh and the rank smell of blood that clung to their skin in the last hours before they met their maker. Sometimes Peggy would stay with them, pet their hair and let them call her whatever names of sweethearts and mothers they would never see again.

The pavement is busier at dusk than midday, thick with men and women making their way back home after a day of work, laden with paper bags of groceries as they weave through the crowds. Peggy pushes her fists into her jacket pockets and sets off with purpose, shoulders hunched against the great press of humanity she cannot keep from touching her entirely.

Most of her previous time in New York she spent alternating between the training camp and the myriad of secret locales the SSA maintained in the city proper. But she had a little time to herself and remembers the neighborhood well enough. The streets are so remarkably neat, laid out on their grid.

In five minutes, the buildings change from vaguely familiar to achingly familiar, and Peggy slows her pace.

The last time she drove these streets she was in the back of a car with Steve, watching him fiddle with his uniform and take deep, steady breaths. She remembers his catalogue of old battlegrounds; took a beating here, took another there. She wanted to smooth down his hair and kiss the old hurts away, tell him what a beautiful, brave boy he was.

And then everything changed, as it is wont to do. And she drove away with her hands shaking and her eyes burning with tears she would rather have died than let fall.

Slowly, Peggy walks down the street, letting her eyes skim over the names painted in the storefronts. There’s a druggist, with the owner still behind the counter in round spectacles and a white coat, then a butcher with two children playing on the floor while their father in a bloody apron hauls silver trays of his wares. Peggy smiles softly at them, fondly. Dr. Erksine, while pretending to be the proprietor of the lab’s storefront, used to keep hard candies in his pocket for them.

She stops in front of the lab’s storefront, with her heart pounding and her breath coming short and unhappy.

It’s been neatly and thoroughly boarded up. The front window is soaped over to total opacity and there’s a thick, vicious looking lock on the door. Peggy has little doubt that those deterrents are even a fraction of the preventative measures put in place, even knowing just as well that there’s not a chance in heaven or hell any of the machinery is still in place. There’s really no easy way to explain a sprawling subterranean complex, and the war is newly over and people are still, in the back of their minds, nervous.

A few enterprising souls have taken graffiti to the boards. Some young man named Otto is apparently rather in love with a Suzy; Peggy touches the tip of her finger to the smeared red ink and genuinely wishes them well. She imagines a young man so full of passion for this girl that he couldn’t contain himself. It is a more romantic image than a drunken reprobate memorializing a night’s unreciprocated passion.

Peggy closes her eyes and flattens her palm over the words. There is nothing _here_ and her heart is cracked before she even realizes she was hoping differently. The desperate, frenzied wishes shrivel as she stands on the street, knowing there is no gatekeeper within the shop to pull the correct book and press the correct buttons and admit her to a place where things still make sense. Dr. Erskine, and Bucky, and Steve are not waiting for her and she is no longer a soldier on the just side of a war. She is a woman lost and she feels so small.

Her coming to America was such an utter whirlwind of unlikely circumstances coming together in a singularly perfect way. And Steve was, at first, just another almost funny illogical element of the mess. She told Dr. Erskine, the first time he pointed out the five foot tall asthmatic little boy in the crowd, that he was utterly mad if he thought the government would ever allow their very expensive project to be wasted on such an improbable specimen of aspiring soldier.

Dr. Erskine smiled at her, patted her arm, and said, “Ye of little faith.” Peggy remembers shaking her head at his unwavering faith. She feels it so keenly now.

Some part of her wants quite badly to pry off the boards and slip inside. She supposes it shouldn’t be too difficult to find the switch to open the panels into the laboratory. For all she knows they’re still in use, and inside she’ll find a grim faced man in a dark suit pointed a pistol at her forehead. She expected for quite a long time to die quickly and violently; such an end would be more fitting than the new prospect of facing the rest of her life.

“Fancy seeing you here, Miss Margaret.”

Peggy’s body instinctively tightens, her fingernails digging into the wood. Her heart jumps up into her throat and her stomach bottoms in a very familiar way; it’s like her skeleton begins to hum and the old defensive gestures clamp onto her frame like she is back in Europe, damp from the cold rain with her knuckles freezing around a gun.

She turns her head a taut inch to the side and looks from the corner of her eye. She recognized the voice before she looked at the man standing a few scant feet from her, hands pushed loosely into the pockets of his overcoat. And still, it is hard to make herself believe that it is him there, hair slicked rakishly and mouth turned into a performative smile.

“I might say the same thing, Howard,” Peggy says quietly. She allows her hand to drop and turns. She copies Howard Stark’s studiously casual posture, hands in pockets and shoulders forced to looseness.

Howard offers up a half grin, but there are fine lines now at the corners of his eyes and perhaps the first beginnings of gray at his temples. He was the one man she saw during the war who seemed to have some ability to let the horror slide off his back. It touched him, but it didn’t sink into him. Howard’s war wounds never seemed all that indelible. They were no more permanent than a passing illness.

“How did you know I was here?” Peggy asks, glancing around the street. It’s more deserted now, windows beginning to glow with faint lights.

Howard shrugs. “I like to keep track of people. I heard you were heading stateside. I figured there were few more likely places you’d go.”

“Ah.” Peggy nods. “And you just coincidentally walked down the street at the same time.”

“Something like that.” Howard extends his hand. “Can I ask you to dinner, Miss Carter? For old time’s sake?”

Peggy has no reason to say no to him, but she still hesitates. It is more difficult than she expected to have him so close to her again. The last time she caught his eye across the room and neither of them smiled, because he has been determined to to find a body burning with a need to _know_ that very few people understood.

There were so many moments when she wanted to rap him smartly across his smug face and remind the brash American that they were fighting a war and there wasn’t time for fondue in Paris. And yet, there were moments when he made her smile and knew he made her smile and just grinned in return, in understanding. Sometimes he allowed her to be angry, which was easier than being hopeless.

“I would be delighted,” Peggy says. “Though I’ll tell you, I shan’t be going back to my rooms to change.”

Howard grins. “I would never think to ask.”

His car and driver are waiting halfway down the block, gleaming incongruously, parked on the roadside. A few children peer at it enviously from front windows. Peggy waggles her fingers at them and gets a shy smile in response. She sees Howard wink and hides a smile. She has lost all sense of what she’s meant to be feeling as Howard opens the door like a perfect gentleman and she slides inside the warm cocoon of the backseat.

The car rumbles to life as soon as Howard closes the door and they jerk back onto the street. Peggy folds her hands demurely in her lap and looks at Howard sitting with one arm folded across his chest and his opposite hand touched to his mouth. He looks out the window, tapping his thumb against his bottom lip.

She wants to ask what he found so far in the north, knowing already what the answer will be. If he’d stumbled across anything, anything at all, she would have heard. Someone would have told her. Captain America was mourned so intensely, to the point where it was sometimes difficult for Peggy to not find the massive outpouring of grief enraging. They didn’t know him. What gave them the right to sob?

“Where are we going?” Peggy asks instead.

“No place special,” Howard says, mouth twitching in an effort not to smile.

Peggy shakes her head. “Somehow I don’t believe you.”

Howard leans across the few inches of space that separate him, so his head nearly touched her shoulder. “Do you trust me?” he asks. His eyes are very dark and lovely in the transient light that shifts through the windows as they drive.

“I never could decide,” Peggy replies, though there is no heat to the banter. No heart.

She’s hardly surprised when the driver glides to a stop in front of one of the spectacular, ridiculous hotels she very deliberately chose not to stay in. This is Howard’s world, after all, and captains of industry have different means from Captain America. A valet hurries to the curb and opens the door; he doesn’t precisely flinch when he sees Peggy’s slightly threadbare trousers and leather jacket. It’s rather more a hint of shock in his eyes. Peggy smiles sweetly at him and takes his proffered hand.

The dinner crowds on the street are done up accordingly; she sees furs and well cut suits, and the tasteful glint of jewels on women’s throats and ears. Peggy smooths down her hair and tucks her hands into her pockets. Howard appears at her side and offers an elbow. “Shall we?”

“I might call you a bastard,” Peggy says. Howard smiles.

Their table is private, lit low and intimate, and the menus the waiter lays in front of them are embossed on heavy paper. Peggy traces her finger along the rim of her empty wine glass and watches Howard peruse the place’s fare with studious interest. She smiles softly to herself; she has never been charmed by Howard as such, at least not in the way that his smile usually sends girls weak kneed and fluttery.

She does like him, though. However that happened.

“How long have you been back?” she asks, glancing down at the list of food she has very little interest in eating. She’s not hungry, but this is not a dinner about which the dishes will be the most memorable part. It is far too surreal for something such as that.

Howard looks up at her. “A few weeks,” he says hesitantly.

Peggy nods. “Did you--”

He reaches across the table suddenly, laying his hand over hers. His palms are shockingly callused for a wealthy man and Peggy curls her fingers tightly around his instinctively. She always forgets that Howard was not born with a silver spoon in his mouth, that he is an ironmonger who found success. He carries his money and status with such apparent ease. He wants the world to forget his origins.

“Not now, yeah?” Howard says. “Please, Margaret. Peggy.”

Peggy nods. Howard lifts her hands and kisses her knuckles. “What shall we have for dinner?”

She’s sure the food is delicious, as is the wine, but she barely tastes it. Howard keeps up a steady, remarkably natural flow of conversation which requires little more from her than an occasional murmur of agreement or acknowledgement. It is easier to think about the mechanics of a meal, how she must open her mouth and chew and swallow, which piece of silverware to use and to touch her napkin lightly to her lips.

Manners are -- were -- a continual source of amusement and occasional friction between the Yanks and the British boys. Peggy ate at the officer’s table, forever conscious of the odd mix of deference and lechery that her presence always seemed to inspire in the men who didn’t know her well. Howard is neither of those things and that is what grates against the presumptive normality.

Peggy realizes that she has never known Howard in any circumstances that could be construed as normal.

“Howard, I can’t,” she says suddenly, setting her fork down with her lungs tightening in her chest. “I can’t pretend like this.”

For a moment Howard is very still with his spoon hovering absurdly between his mouth and the plate. His throat contracts in a hard swallow and he, so very carefully, returns his spoon to the plate and wipes his mouth. He doesn’t look at her; he keeps his eyes cast down, looking at the white table cloth and seeing far past it.

“I keep trying to do the things I’m supposed to,” Howard says, raising his chin slightly and meeting Peggy’s eyes through his eyelashes. His words come out cracking at the edges, buckling beneath the effort to give them voice. “And it’s impossible, you know? I can’t live my own life anymore.”

Peggy curls her hands into fists so tight her knuckles turn bloodless yellow. Her head sounds like it’s full of rushing wind and, God in heaven, she is tired of the war clinging to her skin like a cobwebs. It should be glorious, being who they are and doing what they’ve done. War is so often clashes of pride blooded by men who have no say, but their war was not that. She has never doubted the necessity of what she did, of what they all did. And still she rattles in her bones and lives each breath with the crushing knowledge that there is no way to go back.

“Howard.” She reaches across the table and lays her hand on top of his.

“I didn’t find anything,” Howard says, voice suddenly flat and hard and unbending. “Not a single goddamn thing. It’s like he vanished from the face of the earth.”

It’s not so untenable a truth to Peggy as it is to Howard. She helped type letters home when there weren’t enough secretaries to be had, dead from disease and cold and even the odd battle wound here and there. The delineation between confirmed dead by a fellow soldier who held his hand and had to leave his body behind and presumed dead because he never emerged from the smoke and blood and filth is so terribly sharp.

She imagines Howard, who lacks practice, finds it much harder to say goodbye to a missing man than a dead man.

“I remember him,” she says. “So do you and everyone else in the SSA and half the world, Howard. After all, he punched Hitler over two hundred times.”

“No.’ Howard shakes his head. “They know Captain America. Goddamn Captain America--”

“We didn’t,” Peggy says sharply, ignoring the tightness of her throat and the burn at the corners of her eyes. The ghosts are too damn close in this city. They breathe down her neck and play with her hair and make her want to run until she finds an untouched place. “We knew him, Howard. That can’t be taken away.”

“It’s not good enough.”

“I know.” Peggy lifts her hand and cups Howard’s jaw in her palm. His skin is just barely rough with the first growth of new stubble, and there are fine lines fanning from the corners of his eyes and bracketing his mouth.

She has no illusions about what kind of man Howard Stark is; his charisma is too intent and too calculated to be the sum of it all, and it is only pretty when seen from a distance. Peggy has lived and breathed bravado for so very long, in soldiers and generals and prime ministers and presidents, exuded by nations of people living with fear so profound they could hardly recognize it as fear any more. And she knows, too, that there is more to Howard that just that.

He wouldn’t have spent so much time searching for a dead man if it was.

Howard lays his hand on top of hers, and his palms are steady. The capability is still a little surprising, though that’s Howard’s doing. He is so entirely competent and he pretends with pointed intent to be anything but.

They make so little sense together, orbiting around the memory of a man who was better than them both.

“I’m not hungry,” Howard says quietly.

“Nor am I.” Peggy draws in a careful breath and exhales, and looks at Howard. “Take me upstairs.”

“That’s not a good idea.”

It’s the simplicity of how he says it that convinces her more than anything else. If it had been lecherous or leering, she would have stood and left the restaurant and the city, started running with her hands outstretched and never stopped long enough to question what it was she lost in the first place. After all, she will never dance with a good man and she can’t find the right bitterness in her middle to blame him for that. For his stupid, awful, unnecessary, beautiful sense of bloody honor. His goddamned heroism.

“I know,” Peggy says. “I don’t care.”

Perhaps there is something to be said for poor choices.

They stand in tandem, and leave side by side. Eyes track them across the room, Howard in his impeccable suit and Peggy in her immensely practical trousers and button down. Peggy raises her chin. She could not care less what these people think of her, not after what she has endured.

It’s quiet and far emptier in the stately lobby of the hotel proper; there’s a distinguished older man behind the desk reading through a ledger and a somewhat less impeccable bellhop leaning against a luggage cart as he inspects the cuff of his uniform. Howard lights his hand on the small of Peggy’s back and the touch is more intimate than she is expecting.

A bank of elevators line the far wall and one opens almost as soon as Howard calls it. The attendant is a stooped man in a faded uniform who smiles serenely at them. “Which floor, please?”

“Twenty-eight.”

The elevator car feels entirely close in the age it takes to ascend. Peggy is acutely aware of the heat that comes off Howard’s body, centering on his hand through her jacket and shirt. She was never particularly shielded from the more uncouth speculation that followed her career. Obviously a woman surrounded by men could only serve one practical purpose, however much her superiors might praise her abilities. She heard the murmurs and the snickers and ignored them and never touched a single goddamn person until she kissed Steve as the hour grew unknowingly late.

Howard was a cockier man a year ago, brimming with certitude that became arrogance and she would have rather smacked him than snuck behind barracks for a kiss. Things change, though. She is certain of very little other than that.

The elevator doors rattle open at twenty-eight and Howard tips a nod at the attendant. And when the car disappears back down to the lobby floor, they are alone.

“Where are we going?”

“Twenty-eight fifteen.”

The floor is populated quite obviously with the very expensive and expansive suits; the ostentation is understated and tasteful, but it scrapes against Peggy’s raw spots. The instinct to ration is, apparently, more deeply entrenched than her own personal preference for simplicity and understatement. They are nothing alike, her and Howard.

Howard unlocks the door and ushers Peggy in, closing it with a definite click of the lock.

A thousand small observations filter into her perception; the notebooks and pencils strewn over the massive desk on top of a layer of schematics and loose papers, and the crumpled clothes tossed over the back of a chair, and the cigarettes stubbed out in the ashtray. She realizes belatedly that she doesn’t know where home is for Howard, or if he even really thinks of himself as having one. Peggy looks at Howard over her shoulder, standing there with his hands in his pockets and his expression attempting to be unreasonable.

But grief is more powerful than him, as is want. Peggy has always though the two somewhat mutually exclusive, but she was wrong about that. She feels them both keenly.

“Are you certain about this?” she asks, cocking her head.

Howard smiles thinly. “I thought that was my line.”

“You should know better than to treat me like one your easily discarded girls, Howard.” Peggy lifts her hands and undoes the top button of her blouse. “Not now.”

“Peggy,” Howard says, like a sigh or an exhale. “You don’t--”

“If you say 'have to' or that I don’t owe you anything, I will--” she raises her chin in defiance. “I will never have thought less of you.” Her hands work over the buttons as though she has only a marginal control over them; they are so very much steadier than she feels, certain and still.

She lets her blouse slip down her shoulders and fall to the floor and it a touch absurd to be standing in a ridiculous hotel room in her trousers and boots and brassiere. “Come here.”

Perhaps it’s permission that Howard needs or a much belated inclination to obey orders, either way Howard _moves_ with breathtaking purpose and suddenly his hands are buried in her hair and she is kissing him like the world is ending and there is nothing else to be done.

There is very little sweetness in this first joining, or tentative tenderness that such kisses always seem to have. But Peggy is not sweet or tender and Howard has lived a year too unforgiving to have left him with any belief in fairy tales. Peggy pours a year of grief and loneliness into the moment, her hands fisted into the lapels of his much less immaculate suit. She tastes something bright and coppery in the back of her mouth like a star burst.

This is and is not what she has been looking for.

When they have to breathe they break apart and their hands fumble at suddenly uncooperative clothing. Together they manage Howard’s jacket, vest, and tie and the buttons of his shirt. Peggy unbuckles his belt with an utterly satisfying shush and slap of leather. Howard manages the clasp of her brassiere and they take care of their trousers and shoes with their shoulders touching and their breath coming hard and harsh.

Peggy’s skin burns with a need she can’t give words to that is only partially about the warmth throbbing in her belly like a pulse.

Naked, Howard kisses her again, and bites at her bottom lip. “Peggy,” he says, helpless and Peggy plants her palms on his chest and pushes him backward the unwilling steps to the bed.

It’s large and soft and the last time Peggy did this was when the war was young and so was she, in the tiny flat of a soldier above a butcher because suddenly it seemed like everyone anywhere could die and she liked his smile. They spent that entire day trading touches and secrets, so that at least one person knew who they were. That was a lifetime ago and Peggy can barely understand that girl.

“I want--” Howard gasps, like he comes to this bed any more virginal than she.

Peggy raises herself on her elbows and kisses his forehead and cheeks, and then his mouth with her hair falling around her face to shield them both from the soft glow of the lamp. “I know,” she murmurs. Her breasts brush against his chest; he is broader naked than he seems in his sharply cut suits. There is something surprisingly solid about the way he feels pressed against her from ribs to belly to hips. She can understand the ironmonger in him, now.

Howard radiates heat and warmth and he smells -- he smells like he always did, of leather and metal and oil. Peggy presses her nose to the hollow of his throat and inhales that scent, that utterly alive scent. It has been a cold year, and lonely. And only now she thinks _unhappy_ , with Howard’s hands on her hips, and his cock hard between them.

She is too practical to be doing this, and she doesn’t care. Because sinking down on Howard draws a gasp from her lungs instead of dust and cobwebs. And it doesn’t matter that this isn’t what she would have chosen, because it is what she has been given and that is something in itself.

Their hips find synchronicity and their mouths find each other. Howard’s nail scrape grooves into her back, but Peggy arches into the sharp burst of sensation.

Her climax comes a moment before his as something hard and brutal and Peggy buries her face in the curve of Howard’s shoulder with her arms wrapped so tightly around her chest she thinks she can feel her ribs creak; she would ask for nothing less from him. She feels like her muscles are wound so tight there is no choice for them but to snap and leave her something like a puppet with cut strings, lying sadly on the ground. She doesn’t know what sounds she might make or what words she might say; to be honest, most of her expects to wake alone in her room with her cheeks bright from want and shame and her body throbbing for a touch it can’t have.

And there is Howard shaking alongside her, coiling with tension so the cords on his neck stand absurdly prominent. He is so much younger than he seems, and wiser than he wishes anyone to understand. God, there is a good man beneath her, inside her; a good man clinging to her as she holds to him, in an effort to keep the loneliness at bay.

In the aftermath her body feels without anchor, just heat and skin together and them breathing in synch as the frantic coming together fades slowly from the room. Peggy lays her head on Howard’s chest so she can hear the thud of his heart reluctantly slow; she can find shame she thinks ought to be expected, at her wantonness and nakedness.

“Peggy?” Howard says quietly.

She closes her eyes. “We’re all right. I promise.”

They find their way beneath the blankets and sleep a little, though it’s still dark when Peggy slips from the bed and dresses methodically in the dimness.

There is a sudden and quietly welcome lightness in her chest that wasn’t there before. Perhaps, she thinks as she buttons her blouse again, this is what she was looking for when she boarded the ship leaving for America. After the war, she’d decided quietly that she couldn’t go back and had only made the choice because there was nowhere else to go.

She threads her fingers through her hair and looks at Howard watching her from his bed.

“You don’t have to go,” he says, propped up on his elbow with the blankets around his waist.

Peggy smiles at him, softly. “I do,” she says and stands. Her jacket is draped over the chair on top of his and she shrugs it on. “Thank you, Howard. For dinner,” she says and they both nearly laugh.

“When will I see you again?” he asks.

“Oh, I couldn’t say,” Peggy says. She doesn’t want to kiss him goodbye, because it isn’t that kind of parting. “Whenever you find me again.”


End file.
